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Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

businessinsider.co.za

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Re: Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

#21

Post by m0zg »

This is how it works:

1. Googler wants a promo. They know they need to "launch" to get promo. They can't get a promo if they just improve or maintain something that already exists.

2. Googler gets together with other googlers and puts together something they could launch. Nobody cares if it makes any sense.

3. The thing launches. Googler gets their promo. It is now pointless to spend any effort on maintaining something that you can't "launch" again. Googler moves on.

4. Project dies and gets shut down after a while because no sane person would touch maintenance work with a 10 foot pole.

9 out of 10 projects at Google go through this lifecycle, pretty much verbatim. This is why you have three different Google-provided messsengers on Android, and why stuff launches with great fanfare and then quickly runs out of steam. You get the behavior you reward. This is what Google rewards.

Re: Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

#22

Post by thaumasiotes »

chii wrote: post #15
xeromal wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hand my child over to someone else to raise forever, I'm ditching them. :p

bad analogy. There's no parent/child relationship between this service and google. As long as the service is continued, there's no issue as to who is owning and operating it. Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

> Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

In the same way that when a child is adopted, it instantly dies?

Re: Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

#24

Post by abrookewood »

m0zg wrote: post #21

This is how it works: 1. Googler wants a promo. They know they need to "launch" to get promo. They can't get a promo if they just improve or maintain something that already exists. 2. Googler gets together with other googlers and puts together something they could launch. Nobody cares if it makes any sense. 3. The thing launches. Googler gets their promo. It is now pointless to spend any effort on maintaining somethi…

"You get the behavior you reward. This is what Google rewards." From what I have heard, I think you're right. Promotions and kudos flow from launching new products & services, but not in maintaining them.

Re: Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

#25

Post by rvnx »

chii wrote: post #15
xeromal wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hand my child over to someone else to raise forever, I'm ditching them. :p

bad analogy. There's no parent/child relationship between this service and google. As long as the service is continued, there's no issue as to who is owning and operating it. Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

When you are Google, you have millions in funding, almost unlimited engineering ressources, political connections and many good reasons why a project would be successful (journalists, audience, users, accounts, etc)

Once you transfer the responsibilities; all of the support that kept the project stay afloat disappears. It's not sustainable anymore, there is much limited growth, all the business model for exploiting data for advertising cannot exist anymore, etc.

Well, it's dead you know.

Re: Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

#26

Post by jbc1 »

chii wrote: post #15
xeromal wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hand my child over to someone else to raise forever, I'm ditching them. :p

bad analogy. There's no parent/child relationship between this service and google. As long as the service is continued, there's no issue as to who is owning and operating it. Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

Products often die when transferred to another organisation. They never say that they will die in the announcement.

See https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

It's entirely reasonable for people to assume this is basically Google shutting down the free WiFi service but with extra steps.

Re: Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

#27

Post by tmpz22 »

chii wrote: post #15
xeromal wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hand my child over to someone else to raise forever, I'm ditching them. :p

bad analogy. There's no parent/child relationship between this service and google. As long as the service is continued, there's no issue as to who is owning and operating it. Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

Depends if the project continues to use google branding or has a “built by google” tagged on to it in order to mislead customers that it is still somehow maintained by them.

Re: Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

#28

Post by Covzire »

zapita wrote: post #16
judge2020 wrote: post #2

"ditches" definitely not the word that should describe this (this is towards the article and not the HN submitter since it's the article's title); it could lead those who don't click to think it's another project Google has shut down. > “We are transferring our Station operations in South Africa to Think WiFi who will now carry out the project independently,” a spokesperson told Business Insider SA. > “We'll work wit…

In all likelihood the “transfer” is just a way for Google to save face and avoid yet another “Google kills project” news cycle. Good on the editors for not falling for it.

Another possibility is that the legal landscape was more hostile than Google anticipated and they essentially got squeezed out.

Re: Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

#29

Post by jaimex2 »

hadlock wrote: post #12

We need a catchy verb for when Google abandons yet another service... De-google? "South Africa's free Wifi service 'de-googled' as Google abandons yet another product"

Microsoft had a brilliant one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogled

Time to bring it back I say.

Re: Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

#30

Post by asperous »

silentsea90 wrote: post #18

I appreciate that Google tries new things, but I don't get why their success rate seems to fall far short of Amazon.

I think they way they see it is they are a company of scale. Scale is what they are good at (if anything). So they shutdown lots of small successes to try and focus on the huge wins.. things like youtube, gmail, google docs, etc. things millions of people use.
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